Web Conf Guitar Hero

What do you get when you have a conference full of geeks and plenty of free-flowing alcohol?  Well, a Guitar Hero Tournament of course!  All evidence here…

Yep, that’s right folks.  That was the entertainment last night here at the HighedWeb 2008 conference.

And may I say, what a blast?  (Mmmm…maybe that makes me a geek too 😉 )  Well of course I must have some geek in me, because I had a smashing time last night and am very much enjoying the conference as a whole.  And no, I didn’t participate in the tournament, but I did give it a good go cheering all the other good sports on.

What a treat to be in the company of so many like-minded individuals who get the concept and application of social media!  And how enlightening to speak to (the many) folk who are in the same boat I am -> one man/woman web bands for colleges.  And just to listen to some of the amazing technology being used.  And…and…and…well, you get the picture.  So much good information here!

Having a quiet evening to myself tonight though.  Feeling a bit overloaded with information and people.  And still nursing my cold which wasn’t helped by cabin pressure changes from the 2 flights getting to the conference.

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Web Site Design

Web Site Design is my new profession.

This is after 10 years in the IT industry as a Natural Adabas programmer, analyst, project manager, tester, client support and team leader.  Natural Adabas and its compatable technologies (JCL, MVS, MQ, XML, Cobol etc) have been good to me.  She allowed me to move from South Africa to the UK and then to New York and Delaware, all expenses paid.  Heck, she even allowed my rent and untilities to be paid in Battery Park, NY for a whole year!

But times change and circumstances change and now I find myself as the webmaster (or mistress?) for a university in a small town, in a small state of the US.  Wow!  Strange how HTML, Javascript and Java courses I took more than 5 years ago and a self-directed website effort for my department (in my spare time) have come in handy.  Back then I took those courses and did that work to ‘reposition’ myself for the ‘new’ technologies.  In the end I never really used them (bar the HTML for the departmental website) and thought that was the end of that.  Corporate work intruded, as did moving countries, getting divorced and finding new love and a new life.  But you never can tell how your life’s path will take you.

It’s all been due to the breakdown of my corporate self (another story for another day) and the influence of my sweet honey.  He is a true computer genius, with many websites under his belt, both personal and professional.  He also works a regular 9 to 5 job, to stabilize his income, puts together networks for small businesses and will do ANYTHING you need that is computer related, including building computers.  And now he has taken me under his geeky mentor wing, teaching me website design and PHP.

So anyway, the long and short of this post is to say that in an effort to lessen the burden on him, I am attempting to do my own investigation and learning, and only bugging him when I absolutely have to.  With this in mind, I will be building a page on this blog of inspiring web links and interesting information.  Please feel free to comment with any good links, information and books for me.

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